Two new dragon image themes!
It's the Year of the Dragon in the Lunar calendar, so we've made some dragon images to celebrate (and dragons are almost as fun as ghosts).
We made themed sets for Cute Dragons (10y+) and Dramatic Dragons (13y+). (The ages are rough guides only.)
You'll find them when you create a game in Frankenstories.
For demo games, see:
If you're curious about the AI images
When I've written about using DALLE for image sets previously (e.g. here and here), I mentioned that I was hanging out to see if Midjourney 6 offered DALLE levels of compositional control.
The short answer is no, MJv6 is gorgeous but difficult to steer at the moment.
You can see the difference for yourself in the dragon themes: cute dragons are DALLE, dramatic dragons are Midjourney.
Frankenstories wins more awards
Frankenstories won awards in both the primary and secondary education categories Tech & Learning Best of 2023 Awards.
One thing about this is it's nice to be recognised for creating something that is so intrinsically about the process of writing that it transcends year-levels and age groups.
You can see all the winners here (unfortunately, not sorted by subject or type of resource, but there are some interesting names in there).
Frankenstories players wrote 30% more during Halloween
If you've ever wondered just how much kids like spooky stories, we were poking around in Frankenstories data from last year and discovered that kids wrote longer responses during Halloween.
The average Frankenstories response is 26 words per round, pretty consistently, all year long—except during October, when it increased by 30% to 34 words per round.
Take it with a grain of salt, but we thought the increase was worth sharing because we ourselves often wonder about what kids want to write about, and maybe it's ghosts!
(If your students want to build some muscle for next Halloween, check out the Horror Genre (Middle years) lesson or the Gothic in the Deathly Hallows lessons on Writelike.)